Daijoubu
by Bons Baisers
Summary: War's over. World's saved. Everything is supposed to be okay now, dammit. Some Sand-sibs love from Kankurō's POV - not Sandcest.


All characters are the property of Kishimoto Masashi. I'm just borrowing them for giggles. This will probably just be a two-shot story, but who knows? Let me know what you think!

* * *

Kankurō was not having a good day.

Mind, most days were not _good_ days anymore. The desk job that had chafed so unbearably that first year now proved to be a blessing in disguise, affording him both privacy and a certain degree of freedom where his hours were concerned. His office in the theatre, where the most recent crop of puppeteer recruits trained, had been decorated by a softer, more academic sort of man. Kankurō had been too lazy to update it to suit his own tastes, and that had been a blessing, too, because he was currently curled up in a ball on the other's man's sofa. His head beat a heavy, painful rhythm against the navy upholstery with its thin teal and turquoise stripes, and his stomach churned, though there was nothing in it.

Groping for a coherent thought through the pain, he tried to remember which particular cocktail of drugs he was supposed to take now. There had been so many medications, and so many varying dosages of each, that he had almost given up on finding a pharmaceutical solution to his current dilemma. But the medics insisted. He still may have ignored them, except for the simple truth that he would eventually have to justify that decision to Temari and Gaara. And really, they did help. The migraines came less frequently and didn't last as long. Besides, when it got this bad, he didn't have other options; at least, none which left him able to work.

Not that he was able to work now. No, today was definitely not a good day.

His stomach heaved, and he pressed his lips together, trying to decide whether he was really going to be sick. He no longer wondered whether one could vomit on an empty stomach. One most certainly could. It was horrid, noxious green bile and undiluted stomach acid, not masticated meat and plant fibers, but it came up just the same way and tasted twice as bad. That thought decided it: he rolled off the couch, dizzy with the headache, and staggered into the bathroom with his pounding head in his hands.

When he had finished, he lay spent on the cold tile floor. Spots danced before his eyes, but he didn't have the strength to get up and turn off the bathroom light. Going back to the sofa was out of the question. There had been resistance and escape training which had been preferable to this, he thought dimly, and a vague recollection of being held for hours in icy water bubbled through to the surface of his mind. After a moment, that memory was all that remained, and he slipped out of consciousness into a thankfully painless sleep.

When he woke, it was dark out, and the whole theatre campus was silent. The migraine had passed, though it left him with a crushing sense of fatigue. That didn't matter. Most of the time he felt just this exhausted, and he managed anyway. Research and development really didn't care if you worked dawn to dusk or dusk to dawn, as long as it got done eventually. It was his kind of work, and he enjoyed it, truthfully. The only reason he'd hated this job to begin with had been the certainty that Gaara had stuffed him into it in hopes of keeping him safe, and because he knew it would eventually remove him from the duty roster for active assignments.

He was an excellent shinobi, but a genius inventor. Already his role as a craftsman, a weapons master for Suna, was guaranteed. Soon, the brightest and most promising would-be puppeteers would be apprenticed to him, as he himself had once been to his master, and such a role was an important one, far more important to the village than one rank and file jounin puppeteer. It was an honor to have risen so quickly. It was a joy that his little brother had believed him capable of filling such a position, long before Kankurō himself had realized just how completely his skills exceeded those of his peers. It was an honor and a joy, and he loved making puppets. This was all true. But for all of that, it was damned boring.

Temari had met a similar fate, as Gaara's indispensable right hand. She was the Kazekage's secretary, emissary, bodyguard, and anything and everything else he needed her to be. She'd slipped into her assignment with far more grace than Kankurō, who missed the excitement, the blood, and the thrill of wreaking havoc with his creations. He was a true son of the puppeteer corps; the art was indivisible from the fight. But he was also a loyal brother, even if Temari still thought he was a pain in the ass, and he couldn't deny Gaara anything. If Gaara wanted him at home, home he would stay.

Of course, he'd barely seen Gaara or Temari in the last few months. Rendered useless for hours at a time, he spent most of his waking, functional hours at the theatre, trying to keep up with his largely self-imposed workload. He met them for brief lunches, where he ate almost nothing, long enough to keep abreast of the little fires the Kazekage was constantly called upon to extinguish. Then he inevitably regurgitated whatever he had eaten as soon as he found himself with the privacy to do so.

That hurt less than the headaches, but the medics seemed more concerned with his inability to keep anything down than with the recurring agony in his head. That business had started about three months ago. After a few weeks of absolute misery, he'd given up on solid food. Then on semi-solids. Finally even water proved too much. Except for his lunch dates with his siblings, he didn't eat anymore. There were bags upon bags of fluids in his desk drawers, along with miles of plastic tubing, a sharps disposal box, and dozens of sterile needles that went into it after each humiliating, intravenous feeding. At least he'd managed to get them to insert the catheter into his leg, rather than his chest, where they had initially wanted to place it. This way he could hang the bag from his desk drawer knob, keeping the whole process hidden as long as he stayed seated.

He was supposed to do it twice a day. It was a hassle and a half to do it even once, because he _also_ had to get hydration intravenously twice a day. He had enough sense not to forgo those fluids, but just one bag kept him chained to his desk for two hours at a time, and the feeding bags sometimes took three hours apiece. Usually he managed one, but sometimes he didn't bother at all. Last week he'd been down twenty-six pounds since the first time those godawful headaches had driven him to the seek help, and he'd lost it all in the last three months. He'd been forbidden to train, two weeks ago (an injunction he ignored) and the hospital was threatening to admit him if he didn't manage his feedings better.

Kankurō grimaced to himself, gathering his bearings as he peeled himself off his bathroom floor. As a little kid, he'd been a tad pudgy, and Temari liked to remind him of it. Especially in those early months after Gaara stuck him in the theatre, and he'd had a rough time adjusting to how little food he needed when he wasn't forever running from one crisis to another. He hadn't exactly ballooned up, but he had put on a few pounds purely in ignorance.

She couldn't tease him now, he thought ruefully, dragging his shirt up before the bathroom mirror. His ribs protruded above his hollow belly, and he'd had to order new trousers to fit his slenderer physique. He studied his empty stomach for a moment, grateful that whatever was causing the nausea also seemed to eliminate hunger. That would have been truly unpleasant, to be starving twenty-four seven. Hopefully gaining weight would prove a more enjoyable experience than losing it.

He smirked and dropped his shirt. That, he was looking forward to. He didn't really obsess over that kind of stuff, but the idea of Temari pushing food at him instead of constantly admonishing him to eat less – now, that might just be worth all of this. Whatever this was. The medics didn't know.

He rubbed his eyes wearily, resolved not to worry about it. Time to get to work, he thought, the wheels in his head already grinding against gears and cogs, pulleys and poisons.


End file.
